America's unfinished business:
To show the world it happened

The �ghosts of enormous wrongs� was the way a National Urban League colleague referred to them two years ago in an article for our Opportunity Journal magazine.

He was writing of the thousands of Black Americans lynched in America during the century from the end of the Civil War to the legal and political victories of the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s.

He wrote of a time when �Any black man, woman or child could be taken at any moment into what John Lewis, the Congressman and civil rights veteran, rightly calls �an American holocaust��a maelstrom of violence. � Their innocence would not protect them.  The law would not protect them.  Neither Black Protestantism nor the Christian precepts supposedly embraced by the White South would protect them.  African Americans in the South were alone.�

My colleague drew his inspiration from an extraordinary book, �Without Sanctuary:  Lynching Photography in America,� and resulting exhibit of the same name which, when it opened in New York City, first, at a private gallery, and then at the august New York Historical Society, struck the city like a thunderclap.  More than 50,000 people saw the exhibit in the two venues.   

The book and the exhibit contained graphic photographs and postcards of lynchings�which were once ubiquitous as commercial merchandise and keepsakes for many White families�collected by James Allen, a White Atlanta antiques dealer.

The �Without Sanctuary� exhibit has now opened in Atlanta, at the Martin Luther King Jr. historic site.  It is sponsored by Atlanta�s Emory University, which houses Allen�s collection, and the National Park Service. 

The news reports indicate that what happened in New York is being repeated in Atlanta.

There, as happened here, people are going through the exhibit with stricken looks on their faces, stunned, as my colleague wrote two years ago, by pictures that convey �the ferocity of violence that engulfed these men, women and children, a violence so barbaric as to be almost beyond belief.�

The media�s coverage also indicates that, while many who had come to see the exhibit, had known that racially-motivated lynchings had occurred in the past, they didn�t know there were so many. At least 4,500 people were lynched in America between the 1880s and the 1960s (one-quarter of the victims were White).  Perhaps an equal number of Blacks were murdered after sham trials leading to immediate executions. 

Nor did they understand that the lynchings were often not the furtive act of a few, but communal events which sometimes drew thousands of White men, women and children to what became a picnic-like spectacle.   

The Atlanta exhibit marks the first time this kind of recounting of America�s past racism has opened in the South, where 80 percent of lynchings occurred.  And the reactions of grief it�s provoking from exhibit-goers are no surprise to those of us who saw it in New York or have read the book.

Also no surprise to me is the very different reaction some other Southerners have had to the extensive coverage the exhibit has drawn from the local media.

�Keep pumping up that hatred of the Blacks against the Whites,� read a letter from an aggrieved reader of the Atlanta Journal and Constitution published in its May 5 issue.

�Keep guilt-tripping the conservative Whites who themselves have done nothing to harm the Blacks,� he went on, adding that �while [the Journal and Constitution] hammers us daily with racially explicit material of one type or another, slanted specifically to foment racial strife, it labels Confederate history and the battle flag as being inexcusably divisive.�

This kind of denial from those Whites who consider themselves ideological kinfolk�or are actually related by blood�to the Whites who participated in these ritual murders is to be expected.  There are still many Americans with a vested interest in obscuring the past.  

That includes the so-called documented descendants of Thomas Jefferson who make up the Monticello Association. They continue to deny that Jefferson fathered any of the children of Sally Hemings, his slave and mistress, and recently voted to not admit her descendants, their African-American cousins, into membership.

Fortunately, as the Atlanta Journal and Constitution�s coverage has shown, some Whites, along with Blacks, are eager to face up to America�s past. 

They understand James Allen�s point that he wanted to bring Without Sanctuary to the South �to show the world it happened.�

That point is being underscored this week with the marking of the 48th anniversary of the Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka Supreme Court decision, and the opening of the trial of the last of the named suspects in the infamous Birmingham Church Bombing of September 1963.

The point is that facing history is the only way grievous wrongs can be atoned for and the lives of the innocents�past and present�redeemed.

(Hugh Price is president of the National Urban League.)